palladio virtuel

The summer internship at Eisenman Architects was a course in history, a lesson regarding precedent, and an inquiry into the world of formal analysis. Assigned to Peter Eisenman’s academic team, an extensive analysis of Andrea Palladio and 20 of his Villa projects were placed under scrutiny with respect to “Eisenman’s proposal [of] a virtual Palladio of adjacencies, superpositions, and overlays…show[ing] a complex Palladio of indeterminate relationships, oscillating between possible interpretations.”

Given the task of analyzing Villas Cornaro, Zeno, and Emo, the first assignment was to discover multiple occurrences of the ABCBA pattern found in Palladio’s work. “The A is the atrium or frontispiece, the B is the transition space, the C is the central space, B is the rear transition space, and A is the rear portico.” Second, synoptic/analytic 3-dimensional models were developed as an architectural means to embed the various layers of information discovered in Palladio’s plans as re-drawn for I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura. The third assignment was supplementary to the notion of an ABCBA organization laid out by Peter Eisenman’s theoretical position; these notational axonometric drawings focus on a range of formal transformations and manipulations evident through Palladio’s plans.

The following representations are the result of close interaction and group discussion with Peter Eisenman, research assistant Matt Roman, and the accompanying Team Palladio. Graphic, formal, and modeling languages/techniques were established as a team and fine-tuned through individual intensive work.